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Overheating PCH and crashes

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jshowalter

New Member
Joined
Aug 4, 2012
I built a fanless system with the following components:

Streacom FC8 fanless chassis
Intel DH67CFB3 motherboard
Intel Core i7 3770S Processor 3.1 GHz
Crucial 2 x 8 GB 240-pin DIMM
Intel 520 Series 180 GB SSD
slim Blu-ray player

It boots in six seconds, logs in in three seconds, and is completely silent (except for the optical drive of course).

But it has two problems (that may or may not be related):

1) The PCH is running hot, much hotter than anything else monitored by Intel's utility (processor ~38 C, PCH > 78 C).

2) Home Designer Pro, a graphics-and-CPU-intensive application, tends to crash the machine.

When it crashes, it leaves no trace. The only thing in the logs is a Critical for lost kernel power and an Error for unexpected shutdown, which together tell me nothing I don't already know--the system crashed for some unknown reason. There are no other events.

The crash doesn't give me a BSOD. It gives me a black screen, and the system then proceeds to boot from BIOS and come back up into Windows.

It seems to crash more as the PCH heats up, but that could be my imagination.

It also crashed a couple of times doing copy/paste into Paint (ironically, to take pictures of the heat sensors). This happened when the PCH was close to yellow in the monitor, but again that's not definitive.

I ran across this on a different forum: "The Intel DH67CF-B3 is an excellent motherboard but it only has one tiny heatsink, so you need to replace that if you want it to stay cool under load in a case without fans."

If that was in reference to the heatsink on the PCH, does anyone know where to get a better heatsink? The FC8 has grooves available in the heat blocks to run more heat pipes, so I could run one or more heat pipes from the PCH to cool it, if there is a heatsink for the PCH that is designed for heat pipes.
 
It does sound like a heat problem.. ALL Electroics needs some kinda cooling! No matter what most say.. They do.. What PSU do you have?
 
I have the same problem with a Streacom FC8 case and an Asrock Z77E ITX motherboard + an Intel 3770S CPU + a Streacom 150 Watts PSU.

Reboots occur when the temperatures get high in games like:
- Call of duty 4
- Legend of grimrock

But no reboots while playing Quakelive. I had also reboots watching HD movies using VLC media player so I switched to Media Player Classic Home Cinema. But no reboots using a CPU burning test. It seems that reboots occur when the integrated GPU is really used.

I searched a lot on the internet to solve this issue. Some say they switched to a PSU from mini-box.com and that did the trick.

I have no reboots except for new games so it is not a major issue for me as I'm not playing a lot but I cannot let this unsolved so I will buy a new 160W picoPSU-160-XT from LinITX.com and a its FSP 12V 12.5A 150W AC/DC Adapter.

I will also put better heatsinks on the northbridge chipset and on the memory modules.

Maybe the picoPSU is also too close to the hot memory, slightly touching it. I figure I will use an extension 24 pin cord to place it somewhere else in the case where its cooler.

Some PSU have poorer performance when the temperature rises. I hope the newer PSU will have better performance. A picoPSU review on the internet reveals that some are better than others and the combined power brick has also quite an impact on keeping steady voltages.

But since you have the same CPU as mine it could be that the 3770S asks too much energy on the PSU when in Turbo mode. In that case we are doomed.
 
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Is it a heat problem in the PCH, a voltage problem with the GPU, a combination of both, or something else?

I've been focusing on the PCH temperature, because it is much higher than other monitored values, and higher than others have posted online. But that could be a red herring.

What improved heatsinks have you found for the chipset that will fit in the case? I've been trying to figure out how to get a third heatpipe to the PCH itself, but there's not much room. Plus for all I know the insane heat from the CPU heatpipe will make the heat flow the wrong direction and actually make the PCH temperature worse.
 
I have that heatsink, plus a couple of others I got on spec. They all have a bigger footprint than the stock heatsink, which is unfortunate. I'll follow up on your suggestions about the power supply. Thanks for your help--that hadn't occurred to me to look at.
 
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